Author Archives: stuartelden

Heinrich Meier, Nietzsche’s Legacy: Ecce Homo and The Antichrist, Two Books on Nature and Politics – University of Chicago Press, trans. Justin Gottschalk, March 2024 [update 15 October 2024: the book is reviewed by Joshua Fox at NDPR] A reappraisal … Continue reading →

Laleh Khalili, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring – Discourse 013, November 2023 The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all rest. In this vital new … Continue reading →

Jamie Peck, Variegated Economies – Oxford University Press, July 2023 The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as … Continue reading →

Andrew Feenberg, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis – Verso, February 2023 For several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the … Continue reading →

Robert T. Tally Jr., For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism – Zer0 books, June 2022 For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound … Continue reading →

Shellen Xiao Wu, Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China – Stanford University Press, September 2023 From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources … Continue reading →

Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History – Stanford University Press, January 2024 In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin’s entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning … Continue reading →

Simon Dalby, Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World – Agenda, November 2023 We are the only species that uses fire. It has determined how we have made our home on this planet and it has propelled us to … Continue reading →

Kenneth W. Harl, Empires of the Steppes: The Nomadic Tribes who Shaped Civilisation – Bloomsbury, March 2023 The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These tribes … Continue reading →

David Myer Temin, Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought – University of Chicago Press, August 2023 An examination of anticolonial thought and practice across key Indigenous thinkers. Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies, yet … Continue reading →